Body as a house – space, experience and mind in the transformation of trauma

Trauma is a person’s emotional response to a distressing experience. Unlike ordinary hardships, traumatic events tend to be sudden and unpredictable, involve a serious threat to life and feel beyond a person’s control. Trauma is far-reaching and systemic – it cuts us to our bones. It can dissolve our sense of identity, diminish our capacity to locate ourselves accurately in time and space, inhibit our tolerance for interpersonal relatedness, and so much more – just like architecture can. Recent research shows that emotions can be mapped across the body and transformed through innovative therapy methods, through touch and dance. They demand different spacial typologies.
In order to create different design agendas towards trauma-informed design, disciplines like psychology, architecture and neuroscience generate different design responses. Those responses are incorporated in a design task for a therapy quarter at the Donaukanal in Vienna, Austria.

Ultimately, mental health and public life intersect on such an urban spot. This gives the project an opportunity to explore the interrelations between the informal trauma-informed design of public spaces and the specific configuration of novel embodied psychotherapy typologies. By focusing on a holistic, therapeutic space experience, the thesis project concludes that mental health in contemporary society and evaluates how that might influence future design agendas in urban planning, landscape design, and architectural decisions.

In times of a global pandemic, trauma became not only an individual but also a collective concern. The threshold to lean into that state of vulnerability is still preventing a lot of people from opening their minds towards mental health issues. Trauma-informed design can break this threshold using very little resources.